THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

virtue of his influence, responsible for the firm establishment of the elder writer’s literary and lexical authority in the
fifteenth century. Although he lacked Chaucer’s subtlety, delicacy, and discrimination, Lydgate successfully continued
the process of rendering English a universally acceptable vehicle for the practical and flexible expression of elevated
thought in poetry. Chaucer’s creative influence is particularly recognizable in Lydgate’s variations on Troilus and
Criseyde, The Book of the Duchess, and The House of Fame - The Floure of Curtesy, The Complaint of the Black
Knight, and The Temple of Glas (all of them written in the early 1400s). Even in his later work, where his emphatic
gravity and deliberate parades of learning tend to preclude Chaucerian whimsy, he can still aspire to moments of
irony (particularly when he deals with women). As The Siege of Thebes and the encyclopaedic catalogue of human ills
delineated in The Fall of Princes suggest, Lydgate saw history as offering a lurid series of warnings against excessive
ambition in princes and in the upper nobility. His imaginative exploration of the threats to civil peace and of the
consequences of national discord was doubtless seen as uncomfortably prophetic by those readers who turned to his
works during the period of the profoundly contentious civil and dynastic upheavals of the Wars of the Roses (1455-
85).
The poetry of Thomas Hoccleve (?1369-1426) suggests a very different kind of unease. Hoccleve, a scrivener in the
office of the Privy Seal at Westminster, certainly never enjoyed the degree of influential patronage accorded to
Lydgate, though The Regement of Princes (1411-12), written for the future King Henry V when he was Prince of
Wales, was clearly intended to recommend both moral virtue and the poet's talents to the heir to the throne. Despite
this and other claims to public attention (such as his Balade after King Richard II’s bones were brought to
Westminster), Hoccleve emerges as the most self consciously autobiographical of the poets of the immediately post-
Chaucerian decades. He was one of the first writers to use the often fraught events of his own life as a subject for his
verse. This is especially true of the Prologue to the Regement, a
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2,000-line complaint cast in the form of a dialogue with a beggar whom the poet meets as he wanders the streets on a
sleepless night (‘So long a nyght ne felte I never non’). Earlier poets had described restless lovers, but for Hoccleve it
is thought itself, not thoughts of love, that determines his mental distress:
The smert [painþ of Thought I by experience
Knowe as wel as any man doth lyvynge;
Hys frosty swoot [sweat] and fyry hote fervence,
And troubly dremes, drempt al in wakynge,
My mazyd hed sleplees han of konnyng
And wyt despoylyd, and me so bejapyd,
That after deth ful often have I gapyd.
The narrator’s nervous melancholy here is quite distinct from the generous resilience of the kind of persona employed
by Hoccleve’s ‘dere mayster ... and fadir [father]’, Chaucer. His private and professional dejection has, he claims,
been determined by the tedium of his job, the tyranny of his employers, the failure of his eyesight due to poring over
scraps of parchment, and the paucity of his remuneration. As a young man about town he pursued women, but had
little success with them; now, as an old man, all he has to look forward to is penury. His complaint is more than a
conventional diatribe against the moral distortions and abuses of the age (though, as the listening beggar is obliged to
hear, those abuses are distressing too); rather, he is dramatically representing a private and unanswerable dilemma
(though the beggar does attempt to offer some consolatory reflections on the universal fickleness of fortune). Hoccleve
endured a severe mental breakdown in the years 1415-20, a distressing period which he recalled in the linked series of
poems written in the early 1420s. The sequence opens with the gloomy Complaint (set in ‘the broun sesoun of
Myhelmesse [Michaelmas]’) and continues with the more optimistic Dialogue with a Friend, an account of a friend’s
efforts to coax and cajole the poet back into a self confidence and back to the consolations of poetry.
Poetry in Scotland in the Fifteenth Century
The Kingdom of Scotland, or to put it more precisely the independent realm ruled by the King of Scots, witnessed a
distinctive flowering of literature in English in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The significance of this
efflorescence lay not simply in the fact that the literature was written in the English language as it was spoken in the
Lowlands of Scotland, and therefore not in the Gaelic of the Celtic-dominated Highlands, but also in its receptiveness
to the vernacular traditions evolved south of the border with England by Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. The Scots